This absurd figure, with his PhD in the economics of railway engineering,
should never have been given the IPCC job in the first place, writes Christopher
Booker

The only sad thing about the resignation of Dr Rajendra Pachauri as chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is that it was brought about by allegations of sexual harassment by a young female employee of his Delhi research body, The Energy and Resources Institute (Teri), from which he has also now stepped down.

Laughably described as “the world’s leading climate scientist”, this absurd figure, with his PhD in the economics of railway engineering from an obscure US university, should never have been given the job in the first place. As a vegetarian, he jetted round the world exhorting everyone else to save the planet by giving up air travel and meat. Thanks to the prestige of his position, his institute was showered with millions of dollars by international institutions, from global banks to Yale University (not to mention £10 million from British taxpayers).

But above all, Pachauri, with the looks of a pantomime villain, should have resigned when, in 2010, the super-scary IPCC report over which he presided in 2007 was shown – not least by this column and by the assiduous researchers of my co‑author, Richard North – to have been full of wildly unscientific errors emanating from green activists.

When we traced its claim that the Himalayan glaciers would have all but melted by 2035 to an obscure Indian scientist quoted by WWF (a claim so mad that even the IPCC had to withdraw it), we were even more amazed to find that Pachauri had hired the man responsible to be Teri’s chief glacier expert.

He may now finally have gone, But the damage he did to the IPCC’s credibility as a serious scientific body is irreparable. What a pity the politicians of the West, led by President Obama and our own here in Britain, still don’t seem to have noticed.